Tag: charting

We have previously described four learning behaviours which we feel describe the ways in which an individual engages with their personal and work learning environment/ personal learning network. See Littlejohn, Milligan and Margaryan, 2011 and Milligan, Littlejohn and Margaryan, 2012 for academic papers). We term the behaviours the 4c’s: consume, connect, create and contribute. We tend to argue that learning networks and personal learning environments facilitate connection creation and contribution, whereas traditional learning environments (and their associated pedagogies) were more focused on consumption.

Although we’ve settled on 4c’s, a fifth option: curation describes an important and emergent behaviour in social networks which has clear overlap with these behaviours. This blog post (long and hastly written) captures some of my current thinking about tools in this area.

In the good old days we saved bookmarks. To our own computers. Then along came del.icio.us allowing public sharing of bookmarks, and through tags a great mechanism for discovering trusted knowledge sources and gaining an insight into how other people in our networks conceptualised and structured knowledge. I was an avid user of delicious from its early days – and I think it is an incredibly powerful social tool for learners and for learning. But I hardly use delicious anymore …

I used to have a simple workflow – find things via Google Reader, and save everything useful to delicious, organising with different tags. I shared stuff using the special for:username tag to individuals in my close personal network. and I used to make notes about the resources as i saved them in delicious. This is incredibly powerful in learning terms … Going back to the 4c’s I consumed content, I connected it to my existing knowledge structures (by tagging) and to people in my network (using the for:username tag), I created new knowledge associated with the new resources I’d identified (appending notes) and making all this public through an open social tool represented my contribution back to my learning network, and beyond.

Sometime in the last two years or so, my delicious tagging started to slow considerably and my sharing fell to zero. Sorry network. The reason: the other tools in my personal learning environment evolved, and new ones arrived, while delicious (and Google Reader) stagnated. These new tools have different affordances, but bring some limitations.

In the last 7 or 8 years, the web (and how we interact with it) has moved on, not least with the advent mobile devices and apps. My simple discovery and share workflow has evolved – but not for the better. Now I tend to put things in silos – I save recipes to ‘Pocket’ because they are then easily accessible when I am cooking and have my tablet with me. I store research papers to Mendeley or Zotero where I can search, music videos go on tumblr, tips and tricks articles to Evernote. I’ve gradually migrated many of my newsfeeds from Google Reader to Flipboard where the reading (consumption) interface is much nicer. Managing /curating and consuming my content streams is infinitely easier than it was before. But there’s been a silent cost. In some of these new silos I have retained networks, but not in all. Specifically. FlipBoard and Pocket feel very personal to me and not social at all (they support consume, but not so much connect).

And what about create and contribute … I really like Pocket, and if I am honest I don’t really mind that it is not ‘social’ (in the short run, I don’t suffer) but one thing that does frustrate me is that I can’t annotate the things I keep there. I want to be able to write ‘halve the quantities’ or ‘use butter not margarine’ somewhere to remind me when I make a recipe again, but this online version of a recipe folder doesn’t give that option (it doesn’t support create). And with it not being social, there is little option for me to contribute. That’s a real shame.

Likewise with FlipBoard. Up until now there was no coherent sharing within FlipBoard (you can ‘tweet out’ single articles from the Flipboard app) So it was interesting to read today that FlipBoard is adding a social layer to its app. This immediately made me think – hey, this is a great way to share stuff I discover – I can curate a bundle of content I’ve found which is interesting to me and share it with anyone else who is interested (connect). But a quick look at lunchtime confirmed that their view of social still doesn’t extend to giving me a ‘voice’to annotate my curated selection – there is no facility for creation.

So, where are we? it seems that our social web spaces are increasingly driven by content consumption and curation … and while tools supporting these actions have evolved, this has been at the expense of functionality for creation and contribution. If we are to make use of social web tools for learning, we have to recognise that the functions of the tools we find may not match with the balance of functions we would like our learning tools to have.

If anyone knows of a good tool that gets the balance right then I’d love to know. Scoop.it seems to get creation right (allowing annotation/commenting on resources), but I’m not sure about the others – though in truth i haven’t yet used myself, only seen other’s scoops.

This blog contains many posts about ‘charting’ and ‘charting tools’. Although we have had versions of the tools for some time, various issues have meant they were never really public. Recently, we have moved the tools to a new server and it makes sense to make them available for people to explore.

I’ll be demonstrating the tools at the EC-TEL conference in Saarbrucken, Germany on (I think) 19th September 2012. In preparation for that, we have prepared a short (silent) demo as an introduction to the tools:

Meanwhile, you can access the tools at http://charting.gcu.ac.uk/ The tools are more proof of concept than anything else, but should hopefully be of interest in helping think through some ideas about how knowledge workers might share learning goals for collective benefit. There are some support pages at: http://www.caledonianacademy.net/spaces/charting11/index.php including links to further reading, and a set of getting started pages.

The tools are a work in progress, so if you use them and find bugs or problems I’m keen to collect any views – just email them to me. As indicated in the demo, the tools are written in Ruby and will be released under an open source license.

In our charting work, goals have always been somewhat problematic, and it’s been easy to leave the issues untouched and unexplored. In preparation for a first proper implementation pilot with these tools, I have started to do some reading and thinking. What follows are some ideas, documented before I disappear on holiday for a couple of weeks. I’ll come back to the topic at the start of July to try and dig in to the academic literature.

We talk about goals, and we always mean ‘learning goals’ [example: I’d like to improve my bid-writing skills], yet we are making some big assumptions – do knowledge workers actually ever articulate learning goals? Can they? Would they want to? Would they benefit from articulating learning goals. For a knowledge worker, goals are more often expressed in terms of:

performance – most knowledge workers articulate their goals during (or in preparation for) annual performance review. Although much is made of the need to make such goals SMART (Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-Bound), this can actually make them somewhat artificial. performance goals can tend to be quite global reflecting the ‘essence of the job*’ [ex. support the development of new teachers across the institution].

tasks – [ex: design a new course]. Goals which relate to a specific task are often easier to formulate as they reflect work activity. Granularity can be a problem here – too big and they end up just describing the different activities a worker is undertaking, too small, and they becomes little more than todo list items: Charting isn’t about task management. | On the other hand, one benefit of task-based goals is that (as knowledge work is often collaborative) these goals often naturally represent shared goals.

outputs – [produce a briefing paper about wind farms in local region] have the advantage that they are probably at the right level of granularity and represent discrete activities which are relevant to work.

But these goal types all reflect business’s focus on achievement, and sit at odds with learning goals which should focus on creating capacity for achievement in the future but may not pay immediate measurable dividends.

In addition to the types described above, we can think of goals in other ways. Some might find it useful to thinnk in terms of short and long term goals to get round the granulairty problem. In TenCompetence**, they discuss proximal and ordinate goals, relating to how an overall learning goal can be achieved through a series of actionable ‘proximal goals’.

Learning goals are all too common from formal education – linked to learning outcomes/learning objectives etc. In the workplace, there may be a tendency to see them in tandem with formal training provision (ex: learn to program in python … TR101: Programming Python.) Yet we know that much of the learning which occurs in the workplace occurs outside the classroom. Would learning goals articulated in such a way that they elaborated how the individual might achieve their goal be more use.

Our test implementation for the prototype charting tools will be a small community of PhD researchers. Although the primary focus of our research is learning in the workplace, I see the learning which occurs during PhD study as being a very special type of workplace learning. Although a formal qualification is gained at the end of the study, the activities undertaken during their study are pretty typical of knowledge workers.

One of the interesting things about PhD study is that it allows us to think about learning from two different perspectives, the learner and the policymaker. PhD students have a core goal in mind (gaining their doctorate), but this exists within the wider aim of ‘becoming a researcher’ which is an essential component of the PhD process. How do the goals formulated by PhD students reflect the core and wider goals they have? Through the JSS, and more recently, the RDF we have a list of attributes which we expect PhD students to develop during their studentship. To what extent is there a match between the goals students formulate, and these skills?

In our work on Charting, we have tinkered with the naming and definition of the different activities which an individual learner engages in as they interact with their personal learning network/the collective to learn. For a while now we have been settled on four C’s: Consume, Connect Create and Contribute. These activities map to other groups of terms that various authors have put forward.

Recently I have come across two instances of another ‘C’ which has caught my eye. First, a post about new functionality in tumblr, an activity stream tool, then this morning, a post by Dave Cormier on ePortfolios. Both of them pick up on the idea of ‘Curation’. I like this term and think it relates closely to our ‘contribute’ which we conceptualise as the things an individual consumes or creates which they actively share (as opposed to collect publicly around them in delicious etc). I don’t plan to change our 4 C’s but I wish I’d considered ‘curate’ at the time.

@kathtrinder kindly offered to let me try out her new kindle. I’m firmly wed to the paperback so I don’t feel I’d use one for my day to day reading, and part of the joy of reading is to pass books on to others – so I’m not interested in an e-Reader for that reason, but I do like the idea of using it to read journal papers. How practical is it for this purpose?

Kathy put a couple of papers on for me – each as pdf’s and converted into kindle format. here are a few first impressions.

Screen etc.: Fantastic – as pleasant as reading off paper – though in truth I don’t ever complain about having to read from the screen – I just know I should minimise it.

Ergonomics: very good – easy to turn pages etc, though I can imagine preferring to hold it if it had a flip cover which made it feel more like a book. Also, anyone who uses a touchscreen phone will find the lack of pinch/zoom etc a bit of getting used to.

Readability: well this was the key test. The PDFs display well but an A4 journal results in text which is far too small to read comfortably: even smaller format journals are slightly too small to read. This is frustrating as these PDFs often have significant whitespace. Do you think the journals would change their layout to make it more kindle friendly? You can of course change the zoom on PDFs, but there are only limited options (100%, 150% etc.) so no option to have the text area fitted perfectly into the screen. The kindle format solves this problem and reading papers in this way is probably most convenient. One of the papers had some full page tables though – which the kindle seemed to (in)conveniently forget to convert/display, though the smaller inline figures converted well.

Annotation: when I read papers, I usually scribble notes in the margins. Despite PDF annotation tools being available through adobe, I’ve never really used them that as they seem too closed. Indeed the initial charting tools we are developing are trying to find ways of breaking ideas and notes out of silo’s (email pdfs etc). Interestingly, you can make notes on the kindle, and it seems to offer the possibility to share with social networks – I didn’t try this out but it could be very interesting if it let you post to any network (i.e. not just ones they promote) and highlight short excerpts to accompany the links. The note feature seemed more usable than I expected, especially given the keyboard.

Anyway, thanks to Kathy for the tryout – very impressive, but still as unsure as when I first saw it announced back in August.

In our work, we have used the term ‘charting‘ to describe the process whereby an individual manages and optimises their interaction with the people and resources who (may) have a role in their learning and development. A Charting system should allow them to:

Discover and Consume knowledge and resources created by others, leveraging value from the collective.

Connect with others who share interests or goals to develop ideas, share experience, provide peer-support, or work collaboratively to achieve shared goals.

Create new knowledge (structures) by combining and extending sources (people and resources and personal reflections etc) to create a dynamic, faithful and individually focused view of the knowledge and understanding they possess about a given topic, and how different topics inter-relate within their personal world-view. This sense-making process is continual, and ensures that the knowledge space evolves with the ideas of the individual, their network and the whole collective.

Contribute new knowledge back to the network formally (as reports, publications, and other standalone artefacts) and informally (as reflections, ideas, ratings and other context-dependent content) for the benefit of either a local group or the whole collective.

But how well do these behaviours (Consume, Connect, Create and Contribute) reflect what people actually do. Andreas’ paper lists a set of ‘knowledge maturing’ activities and I thought it would be interesting to map them to the 4C’s above. Throughout this table, I would probably be happier with the word ‘outputs (inherently digital) rather than digital resources, but I have retained the terms used in the original paper.

Knowledge Maturing Activity

Charting behaviour/comment

Find relevant digital resources

CONSUME: this is pretty straightforward – we see consume activities as forming the foundation of knowledge work – you must possess these skills to recognise useful knowledge and information.

Embed information at individual or organisational level

CONNECT: another essential activity is to be able to contextualise the knowledge and information you find. We see this as a connect behaviour. creating connections and new knowledge structures by combining existing and new knowledge and information is a key activity undertaken by knowledge workers.

Keep up to date with organisation related knowledge

CONSUME: again, a straightforward consume behaviour – within an organisational context, tools such as Outlook and SharePoint probably cover this well already. The challenge is – does this formal organisational information ‘play well’ with knowledge originating through less formal mechanisms and from an individual’s wider network (collective) suvch as the information below.

Familiarise oneself with new information

CONSUME: straightforward – through tools such as Google Reader. Again, the key is to integrate disprate sources of information.

Reorganise information at individual or organisational level

CONNECT: I think this is one of the critical skills that a knowledge worker needs to develop: accommodating new knowledge within your knowledge structures in such a way that it serves short term goals (achieving organisational objectives) without compromising longer term needs – making sure that the knowledge can be reused and repurposed.

Reflect on and refine work practices or processes

CONNECT/CREATE:In this list, this was the activity which I felt was least well accommodated by our 4C’s. I have always thought of ‘reflection’ as being an elaboration of existing knowledge, for example a note attached to a web site of interest – which is covered by our connect behaviour. On the other hand, I think that refining work processes would usually occur within the context of achieving work goals – and therefore I’d classify that behaviour as create. either way, these activities definitly fall within the 4C’s but perhaps need to be more explicitly acknowledged,

Create and co-develop digital resources

CREATE: again straightforward – creation of new knowledge – embedded in outputs or otherwise is the key activity of knowledge workers.

Share and release digital resources

CONTRIBUTE: Initially, we didn’t differentiate between create and contribute but we introduced the distinction to emphasise that contribution knowledge back to the collective is an important (though not always possible) action.

Restrict access and protect digital resources

CONTRIBUTE: … though it might be better expressed as Choosing not to Contribute! In our view, systems should be designed to make contribution as simple as possible. If an individual wishes to restrict access to their knowledge/resources outputs – then it must be a conscious decision.

Find people with particular knowledge or expertise

CONSUME: It is vital to remember that knowledge resides not only as publicly available digital resources, but also within individuals minds. So you can’t only rely on your feed reader to provide all the input into your knowledge stream.

Communicate with people

CONNECT: This is our archetypal connect behaviour – as people are the repositories of (past and future) knowledge.

Assess verify and rate information

CONNECT: Another really important set of actions – enriching the quality of knowledge structures depends on all individuals within the network supplying (consciously or unconsciously) value information about those resources and connections.

The exercise was probably a little simplistic, but it was useful in helping me think through the mapping of our 4 C’s. I tend to separate out ‘consume’ as an initial activity – though of course it is ongoing, then lump together connect and create as being the focus of knowledge work/knowledge production. Contribution then completes the circle – as knowledge contributed by you becomes knowledge consumed by others.

In CA, we’ve been thinking about how we would each describe Charting in an attempt tie down the definition of this concept once and for all. After writing a first draft and then trying to incorporate additional ideas from Allison and Anoush, this is what I have come up with:

CHARTING
The modern workplace has changed in a number of ways:

process innovation and optimisation means that knowledge work now consists primarily of innovating, adapting existing knowledge and resources, and synthesising existing and new knowledge to create new solutions and outputs.

as a consequence of this, a key attribute of knowledge workers is that they must be self-regulating, able to adapt their behaviour and operate autonomously, as well as being able to work in teams taking and ceding leadership as required.

knowledge age tasks are fundamentally interdisciplinary, with transient teams containing a unique combination of experts coming together to solve problems then dispersing once they have fulfilled their shared objectives.

ultimate responsibility for career planning resides with the individual, who needs to manage their own development integrating it with their current practice and responsibilities.

Within this context, how can an individual’s learning be supported in such a way that it benefits the individual and fits with the norms and existing practices of the modern knowledge workplace?

Informal workplace learning is inherently tied to and therefore cannot occur in isolation from the work practices which form the core of an individual’s activity.

As these work practices are fundamentally collaborative, it follows that learning in the workplace will have some dependency on peers and colleagues within and beyond the workplace. Learning is social, and involves dialogue.

For the individual, learning emerges from the processes of planning, organising and making sense of what you have done (achieved) and what you want to do (achieve), therefore systems to support learning should support the individual in planning organising, recording, reflecting on and sharing their practice, as well as in learning with other learners within their group.

Charting is the process whereby an individual manages and optimises their interaction with the people and resources who (may) have a role in their learning and development. The expectation is that for a knowledge worker, learning is inseparable from work, and therefore charting tools would be closely integrated with the rest of the tools which an individual uses to conduct their work.

A Charting system would therefore form one component of an individual’s Personal Work and Learning Interface (a unified view , perhaps adopting a Netvibes or iGoogle type interface) which allows the individual to engage effectively with the collective. This environment should allow them to:

Discover and Consume knowledge and resources created by others, leveraging value from the collective.

Connect with others who share interests or goals to develop ideas, share experience, provide peer-support, or work collaboratively to achieve shared goals.

Create new knowledge (structures) >by combining and extending sources (people and resources and personal reflections etc) to create a dynamic, faithful and individually focused view of the knowledge and understanding they possess about a given topic, and how different topics inter-relate within their personal world-view. This sense-making process is continual, and ensures that the knowledge space evolves with the ideas of the individual, their network and the whole collective.

Contribute new knowledge back to the networkformally (as reports, publications, and other standalone artefacts) and informally (as reflections, ideas, ratings and other context-dependent content) for the benefit of either a local group or the whole collective.

Charting tools would allow the individual to interact with these different elements of their environment in such a way as to allow them to support learning (planning, organising, connecting, recording and reflecting) alongside their day to day practice. Charting systems will incorporate typical tools for:

smart-tagging tools which integrate with colleague networks and disparate repositories of knowledge/information to provide a single point of entry for knowledge structured around their individual conception of their knowledge space,

recommender systems etc. to promote appropriate tools and resources from elsewhere in the collective and similarity tools to identify patterns in knowledge acquisition and structuring

specialised search tools to allow searching of others with similar goals, others who have used similar resources etc. Search should be integrated across knowledge types and sources with smart-tagging tools to suggest tags and encourage cross-linking where appropriate.